My brother picked up one while visiting for Thanksgiving, that giant ****ing pad thing is surprisingly comfortable in your hands. We didn't play anything though. He got the 32gb one with Nintendoland but we were busy with Turkey Day and regular visiting. All we did was power it up, get the HUGE long update and then transfer his account info (games he had purchased) from his old Wii (which he gave to my sister) to the Wii U. One knock I will say I noticed is that the Wii U basically emulates a regular Wii for backwards compatibility and it only emulates it as a regular 2000block (harddrive space) Wii even though it's got a 32gb HD. Dunno if you can emulate an SD card on the HD, or expand it someway without using a regular SD card. But that was kinda dumb. Like I said, we barely touched it so I dunno all the details. But after fiddling with it, I actually went from 0% interest to about 5%.
Probably visiting him in Jan. sometime, hopefully he has a couple games by then. He mainly got it for Pikmin 3, but that isn't until Spring or Summer.